This very unique and exciting project addressed many concerns at the joint Lebanon High School and Hanover Street Elementary School building. With mirrored additions on each school, we designed a fun, playful elementary classroom addition which balanced a more traditional yet modern high school addition. The new entry and student center at the front of the high school provides a bright, sunny space for students to gather and socialize, while also creating a secure, accessible new front entrance. Also included in this addition is a music suite with band room, practice rooms, and offices.

Hanover Street School gained two additions, one housing a much-needed new cafeteria and kitchen, the other containing large, bright, classrooms.  Additional renovations to the school addressed accessibility and special needs programming, as well as cosmetic updates.

“If a child loves school, there is so much you can do with them..”

– Ann Freitag, Principal

Concerned with life safety issues, as well as overcrowding, at the Hinsdale Elementary School, school officials approached us to help find a solution. The biggest obstacle they faced was finding ground level classrooms for the growing preschool, kindergarten and first grade population in their existing 3 story school. The solution was to construct an eight room, single story addition at the back of the school, and renovate the existing first-floor classrooms to accommodate program space for the youngest students. The addition includes six regular classrooms as well as art and music rooms. All classrooms have their own toilets and dedicated storage space. Large windows let in plenty of natural light, while exterior sun shades prevent excess heating in the warmest months. The spacious classrooms, equipped with radiant floor heat, indirect lighting, and soft finishes provide a comfortable environment for these young students to explore and learn.

“The wide hallways, soft lighting, and warm colors create a calm and inviting environment for all who enter. The classroom spaces are big and bright with lots of natural light flowing in which makes them the optimal places for learning.”

– Kat Crosby, Principal

The town of Middleton had no existing school facilities, so when they approached us and asked that we help them plan, budget, obtain voter approval, design, and construct a new P-6 school, we were honored to help out.

 In an extremely fast track process, we had just over one month to develop a program, design the school, construct a 3d model, establish a budget, and deliver a complete, comprehensive vote package to the school district. Two months later, voters overwhelmingly approved the $6.8M project.

 Conneston Construction was brought on board to serve as construction manager for the project, and school opened 16 months later, on time and under budget.

The school houses preschool through 6th grade in a brick and concrete block building separated into a classroom wing and a community-use core area. The core contains the general offices, community media center / library space, multi-purpose room with raised stage, and a full kitchen. The classrooms are spacious, with high ceilings, large windows looking out on the wooded rural site, and contain the latest technology.

The Goffstown School District’s new stand-alone kindergarten / preschool building houses ten large classrooms, an administrative area, and mechanical spaces. The classrooms are designed with the youngest students in mind, from shortened casework to low windows, and plenty of space for games and activities. Each classroom also has an adjacent toilet and storage room.   The main office was designed to accommodate a growing school, and can easily be converted into additional classrooms as the district needs more space.           

The beautiful but challenging site chosen for the school required three driveway stream crossings, and the inclusion of open-bottom box culverts. The intertwining of building with nature has provided the young students with the opportunity to learn about forest, stream, and wetland habitats first hand, and to witness how they change with the seasons.

The design for the Ernest P. Barka Elementary School grew out of the concept that an elementary classroom is a multifunctional space with many demands for which the traditional 30′ x 30′ room might not be the optimal configuration. With this as the starting point, we developed a 2-classroom unit that incorporates a pair of toilets at the younger grades and a folding wall at the upper grades allowing the two rooms to be opened to each other to encourage and facilitate teachers working together or to provide more space for one classroom should the adjoining room be vacant. To provide spaces better suited to an array of activities each classroom is composed of four interlocking areas:

1. The linoleum entry alcove containing cubbies and coat hooks which keeps coat clutter and muddy shoes out of the classroom proper.
2. The carpeted main teaching space with desks or tables and chairs, the teacher’s station and a computer counter along the corridor wall with a built-in TV cabinet and a 32″ TV which serves as a monitor for the teacher’s computer.
3. The linoleum-floored project area bay which contains a sink, storage cabinetry and shelving, extended window sill counter tops for plant growing curricula and , in many cases, a folding wall which allows two adjoining rooms to be opened to each other creating an 800 square foot space with two sinks and a tremendous amount of daylight.
4. Perhaps the most teacher-appreciated component of the rooms: a dedicated storage room directly adjacent to every classroom with floor to ceiling metal shelving on all walls. The need for this space is obvious in most elementary classrooms with piles of Rubbermaid tote bins stacked many feet high on top of cabinetry or against various walls. The sheer volume of supplies required to be housed in an elementary classroom often makes the remaining space inefficient or unusable.

These four areas create a teaching space that is specific enough to remain organized yet flexible enough to allow a wide range of activities to take place. The spaces are further enhanced by large, high windows, direct/indirect lighting, varied ceiling materials and heights and state of the art mechanical systems and controls.

The beautiful wooded setting in which the school was built was carefully analyzed prior to laying out the building which allowed us to preserve many clusters of oaks and blueberry bush ground cover which brings nature into every classroom and sets the tone for the school as a serene and peaceful place.

“Their on-spot advice, low-key manner and their sensitivity to the culture of the community was truly outstanding.”

– Nathan Greenberg, Superintendent of Schools

This building was conceived as a stand alone kindergarten and preschool structure to serve the town’s 500 students that could later be converted into a 2-story middle school. Easily removable pitched roofs, added reinforcing, and spaces planned for future stairs and an elevator make this conversion economical when the transition is made. In the meantime, the district’s smallest students enjoy a very friendly school located in a beautiful apple orchard and pumpkin patch setting, with large classrooms, a sensory/motor skills room, and extensive playground space.

The Heron Pond Elementary School was designed to bring some of the advantages of team teaching found in middle schools to the elementary level. The 700 student school is broken down into six suites of classrooms, each containing five regular classrooms, a corridor “common area”, a staff workroom and a resource room. This allows each group of 115 students and their teachers to have an identity.

The core spaces, including the gym, office, cafeteria, and media center, are able to be isolated from the classroom areas for community night use. To keep all classrooms close to the common spaces, a courtyard and circular corridor layout were used. The courtyard also allows light into the heart of the building, resulting in a bright, airy school.

The building massing is broken down into several smaller units, each with its own pitched roof. This gives the relatively large structure a scale more inviting and comforting to a 3rd grader. The overall impression of the school is that of a village of houses, not an impersonal institutional structure. This theme is carried through to the two story classroom wings with dormers and double hung windows.

The building committee requested a school with sloping roofs wherever possible. We took advantage of this opportunity to open up the ceilings to the high roof planes, creating groups of 2nd floor classrooms that are connected visually at their upper level, with concrete block below to focus student attention inside the classroom. Ridge skylights at the center of these classroom clusters allow natural daylight to stream into all the classrooms from above. Colorful acoustic panels, ductwork, hollow metal frames, and swooping kites installed by our office complete what are some of the most interesting teaching spaces we’ve designed.